I'm sure that after discussing the features of BIRT, you're excited to jump right in. Well, you're in luck, as I am equally excited to show how these features will help you. BIRT is a powerful application to meet one's reporting needs, but the first step is to get BIRT and install it. This can be a bit daunting, as BIRT comes in so many different flavors.
In this chapter, we will discuss the various methods of downloading BIRT and installing it. Specifically, we will cover the following:
- Installing the standalone BIRT report designer
- Installing the BIRT Eclipse Plugin through the Eclipse update manager
- Installing the BIRT Eclipse Plugin Manually
- Building BIRT from source
BIRT has a fairly small set of requirements to run, depending on one's needs.
There are no specific operating system requirements to run BIRT as it is a Java application and it should run on any platform that Java will run on. For the BIRT Report Designer, any platform that runs Eclipse will work. I have successfully run and developed reports under Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
Tip
A fair word of warning to the Mac folks: In the past I have run into some performance issues running BIRT under OSX. It has been a few years and this may not be the case anymore, but I would like to put this forth as a cautionary note. If performance of BIRT is poor under OSX, it might be advisable to try to run this tool under a Linux or Windows setup using Parallels or VMWare.
As far as hardware requirements, I would recommend at least a Pentium 3 processor with minimum of 512 MB of RAM for the BIRT Report Designer to function without problems. The standalone report engine has much less stringent requirements as it does not run a full blown instance of Eclipse. For the standalone report engine, 256 MB of RAM should suffice, depending on the requirements of the application it is being embedded into.